Over the past more than twenty years, the performance and capacity of computer networks, especially the Internet, have soared along the rapid development of electronic technologies. Many users interact with web page servers in order to achieve their purposes. To this end, they browse through and use various services, e.g. meeting organization, flight booking, hotel reservation, and destination customs viewing, via the Internet. To organize a meeting, users possibly need to book a meeting room, view participants' time, and send a notification via a network system. To book an airline ticket via a Internet, users possibly need to view times of airline tickets, view airlines, make confirmation and pay for the tickets. During these operations, users might repeat visits to some web pages. Hence, it is necessary to present the hierarchy of a website to users in an organized way and to lead them to easily find and manage information so that they would not get lost when browsing the website. A breadcrumb trail is thus arranged for facilitating users' visit.
The arrangement of the breadcrumb trail in web applications provides a convenient means for users to browse web pages forward or backward. The breadcrumb trail records users' browsing history and provide the browsing history to them visually. The breadcrumb trail is a linear link identification consisting of a row of hierarchical property links in a website, such as home>>about>>recruitment>>position. This breadcrumb trail can clearly display the location in the overall hierarchy of the page browsing history such that users will not get lost and can be directly linked to corresponding pages. Compared with a browse forward or backward function that is provided by web pages or a browser, the breadcrumb trail is more convenient and better adapted to users' browsing logic.
The breadcrumb trail is applied to an increasing extensive range among newly developed web tasks. By using various technical means, the breadcrumb trail provides visitors to websites with certain channels, such that visitors can visit desired content conveniently. Hence, the breadcrumb trail becomes a fast channel from a page to another page history during website browsing. Pages that were browsed through can be found using the breadcrumb trail. However, inventors of the present invention have noted that the full utilization of the breadcrumb trail is significantly limited by some technical problems related to the breadcrumb trail. A brief description is given below to part of these problems, which has been noticed by the inventors.
There are typically numbers of web pages in a web application, coupled with numerous browse paths. A method of executing a breadcrumb trail through static coding can be easily implemented but is restricted by dynamic browse behaviors or dynamic web content. This method can hardly include all complicated browse logic between web pages. In addition, if a web page or a link between web pages changes, it is difficult to adapt static code to the change. Moreover, besides URL, each web page needs some status parameters to lead browse behaviors. Hence, this method does not support a dynamic page function due to its incapability of supporting dynamic parameters.
It is not allowed to operate on certain web pages for several times. For example, for performing a settlement, it is unreasonable to doing so twice. Hence, the breadcrumb trail should avoid such a repetitive operation mechanism in some cases.
A user-end breadcrumb trail, which stores user status by using a cookie, can support some content-rich user interfaces because it maintains some user status. However, rich user interfaces make the implementation more difficult. The compatibility that a browser supports cookies should be solved. At present, the browser's support of cookies is rather restricted. In addition, it is quite hard to store/read complicated objects in cookies. For example, a user might block a cookie, or a cookie is subjected to a restriction of 4K storage capacity in each domain. Moreover, it is difficult for a cookie to identify or avoid operations which are not allowed.
In view of the drawbacks in the prior art, the breadcrumb trail can be used for effectively delivering website information to users. In addition, the breadcrumb trail may be properly service-intelligent so as to avoid the conflict between its breadcrumb function being provided for users and business logic in web tasks.